The rise, the fall and the resurgence of Red Bull: How a drinks company became the most dominant team in F1

Red Bull entered Formula 1 as a constructor in 2005. The team bought the Jaguar racing team from Ford, a majorly disappointing operation that ultimately proved to be a failure. When the team joined the sport, it wasn't even looked at as a serious team. Red Bull was just a bunch of outcasts having fun in the F1 paddock. On a grid that had giants like Ron Dennis, Frank Williams, Jean Todt, and Flavio Briatore, a young Christian Horner was almost looked down upon in comparison to all of them.

Yet, almost two decades later, Red Bull has built a legacy, a legacy entrenched with dominance and breaking strongly held notions of how a team becomes successful in F1. There is however a bigger question when we look at Red Bull's journey. The team joined the sport in 2005, won its first race in 2009, its first championship in 2010, and then dominated the sport for 4 years.

In 2014 however, the team took a major step back and would not win another title for 7 years. In 2021, it came back with a vengeance, and after winning the drivers title that season with Max Verstappen, Red Bull has redefined the term dominance.

It reached its peak in 2023 when Red Bull lost only once in the entire season and won a record 21 races that season. From a team being dismissed as a 'drinks company' by Lewis Hamilton at one stage to where it is now, it is an interesting case study on how to be successful in F1.

So how did Red Bull become a dominant force in F1, what led to its fall and subsequent resurgence? Let's take a look.

What led to the rise of Red Bull?

Trusting a young Christian Horner

It all started with hiring a very young team principal in Christian Horner. Helmut Marko had a word with Dietrich Mateschitz and the two earmarked Horner to be the man who would lead Red Bull in F1. Just for context, when Horner became team principal, he was younger than a few of the drivers on the grid.

What was even more intriguing was that he was younger than Red Bull's first driver David Coulthard who drove for the team for multiple seasons. In Horner, Helmut Marko saw potential and an unconventional approach to racing. In due time that approach paid off in the best possible way.

Going after Adrian Newey

With Christian Horner onboard, he was going to be the one who would build a team from the atom. Following David Coulthard's advice Horner pursued Adrian Newey.

While almost 2 decades later, pursuing Newey might seem like a no-brainer, it wasn't as simple in 2006. The last Adrian Newey car that won a title was in the last century and his stint at McLaren had not been as satisfactory as he would have hoped.

Newey had left Williams due to a somewhat political fallout in 1996 and there was something similar at play in McLaren as well. Despite all of this, Horner saw the value in Adrian Newey and pursued him until he was willing to be on board.

Building the team around a young talent

The next pivotal step that many forget was Red Bull's strategy to give opportunity to young talent. The young driver academy saw Sebastian Vettel as the driver around whom the team could be built and after being rejected by Fernando Alonso, the team went with the German.

Vettel repaid the trust by winning 4 titles with the team from 2010 to 2013 with his come-from-behind wins in 2010 and 2012 standing out at such a young age.

Capitalizing on in-season testing ban

The other part that is often missed when there is a conversation about Red Bull's dominance from 2010-13 is the fact that this was just the start of the era where in-season testing was banned. The front-running teams like Ferrari and McLaren had dominated the sport for the last couple of decades.

Their development process however was dependent on in-season testing. The teams relied heavily on pounding lap after lap on test tracks and bringing developments to the car. When this was taken away from 2009 onwards, these teams struggled. Red Bull on the other hand had adapted to this in the best possible manner with its wind tunnels not having correlation issues.

While McLaren and Ferrari continued to have struggles with correlation, the Austrian team brought upgrades to the car more efficiently and got the best results.

What led to its fall?

Lack of preparedness for Turbo hybrid era

One thing that caught Red Bull was the impact of the power unit in the turbo hybrid era. The Austrian team always had a less-than-optimal power unit with Renault but with engine freeze the gap was not too big for Mercedes and Ferrari.

This changed in 2014 when Renault's power unit was not only below par in terms of performance, it was in terms of reliability as well. Irrespective of how good the Red Bull chassis could be, the deficit was just insurmountable for the team.

Being a customer team limited Red Bull

One of the major issues for Red Bull in this era that exposed the team's short-sightedness to an extent was the limitation of being a customer team. The team did not build its power unit and was heavily dependent on the supplier.

As a result when Renault's V6 Turbo hybrid completely tanked, Red Bull did not have any other option. Mercedes was never going to supply the team with a power unit, Ferrari was willing to give a year-old power unit while Honda had an exclusive deal with McLaren at the time. It was at this time that the Austrian team was just caught in a no man's land with no option left on any side.

Mercedes just took an unassailable lead

To add to all of this, Mercedes had a massive head start over everybody else on the grid. The team had the best power unit for sure but it was just too far ahead of everyone else.

It was so good that even Willard and Force India became stronger contenders in those years. In an era where the regulations were more or less stable, the Austrian team just had too big a deficit to overcome and was unable to do it.

The team needed a reset after Sebastian Vettel's departure

At the end of the 2014 F1 season, Sebastian Vettel left the team. While initially it did appear that the team had a perfect replacement in place in the form of Daniel Ricciardo, there was still a lot of aligning that the team had to do with its new driver.

The advent of Max Verstappen in 2015 also made it clear to the team and Christian Horner and Helmut Marko who was going to be the future of the team. From 2016 onwards, the team began its rebuilding work with two strong drivers Daniel and Max with an eye on the younger driver to take over the sport in the future. With Daniel departing at the end of 2018, the team's reset wasn't truly complete until 2019 when Max Verstappen truly took over.

How did the team bounce back?

Keeping the core group within Red Bull

The first thing that happens in a sinking ship is the departure of the key personnel. As soon as Red Bull started to struggle in 2014/15/16, the offers from the competition started flooding the top management. Christian Horner almost made a move but was convinced to stay by Helmut Marko.

For Adrian Newey, Horner specifically contacted Aston Martin to run a hypercar program with the aero genius and hence was able to hold on to him. Newey has admitted that the early days of Red Bull's struggles were disheartening because the team was limited by the power unit.

Even Horner has talked about a night-long discussion with Helmut Marko who convinced him not to leave the team. It was this ability to not lose key assets that ended up working like a charm for Red Bull in the end. These are the men instrumental in taking the team to the top and one can't help but imagine what the situation would have been if they had not been able to accomplish this.

Trusting the team and focussing on stability

One of the most common things that we've seen at a struggling team is that the heads start to roll. One after another, people lose their jobs and that's just not ideal and proves counterproductive as well.

Red Bull was fortunate enough to not fall into that trap and continued to keep the employee attrition rate to a minimum. The most important part was that the core group remained the same and did not change unlike what often happens in teams when things start to go wrong.

Building the team around Max Verstappen

Red Bull might not have admitted it at the time but Sebastian Vettel leaving left a hole within the team. Ricciardo was expected to fill that hole but the jury was still out on that one. It was during this time that the team discovered Max Verstappen's prodigious talent and decided to do the same thing it did with Vettel, which was to build a team around a young driver.

Max joined the team in 2016 and was a finished product by 2018 and one could argue if it wasn't for him, the team would not have won the title in 2021 against Mercedes. Max has proven to be a generational talent and even though he's one short of Vettel's four titles, he might have surpassed the German in terms of the level of performance.

A reliable partnership with Honda

Finally, and arguably the most important thing was a tactical move by Red Bull to align itself with Honda. The Japanese brand was unceremoniously discarded by McLaren and was almost out of the sport before the Austrian team decided to take a punt.

The association helped the team bridge the power unit deficit by 2021 and we saw a title contending Red Bull for the first time because of that. It is that association that has helped the team become successful as the power unit is not a liability anymore. Once that was sorted, Adrian Newey found his motivation and we've had the two most dominant seasons of the team's F1 stint.